The Game is Yours

...to do whatever you wish!

Combat is not everyone's favorite part of tabletop role-playing, but for some it's the reason they play. Players may build their character to maximize damage delivered during combat encounters, and referees may excel at designing clever combat encounters with an eye to challenging their players and their player character's abilities. Slaughtering hordes of villains can be a fun power fantasy.

I started my foray into this hobby with The Original Fantasy Role-Playing Game, which I approached much as I would have a typical skirmish combat game, except with some fantastical elements added in. The Original Fantasy Role-Playing Game remains my first love, but...is there more?

My search has led me to trying many games over the years since my discovery of those three little brown books. Many doors have been opened, a few closed and I have learned a thing or two about what i like in my game, and what I don't.

Chaosium has excelled as a publisher of TTRPGs, most offering more than a simple combat skirmish game. RuneQuest, is built around its unique setting of Glorantha, Call of Cthulhu, which features investigative role-play, and Pendragon, which focuses on multi generational play, all focus on the fictional setting and the cast of player characters as part of a culture and society in ways that matter in game play. To approach these games as mere "game engines for combat" would be to miss out on most of the fun they can provide. Yeah, it took me a while to figure this out!

Chaosium's family of Basic RolePlaying (BRP) games, as mentioned above, all rely on the player imagining their character to be a member of a fictional group, with connections and relationships to the setting beyond the basic exploitation and killing of monsters. BRP games encourage player to be asking questions, reaching out beyond the known game world horizons to explore the depths of our imagination through discovery of a fictional world and yes, the games will include some combat, usually in a context where it serves a purpose other than wanton killing, but there is also so much more. Chaosium games have taught me a lot about what this hobby can offer.

Games designed with an interesting setting at their core will often do this. They excite the sense of wonder and curiosity. They delight in revealed secrets that amaze. They push the participants to go beyond their real-life selves, and the world we live in, to imagine things that transcend reality. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I enjoy reading setting books, even though I seldom run anything other than my own homebrew.

I have frequently found that games that focus on the fun of tactical combat often either omit any reference to a specific setting or include something very generic.

The 4th Edition of The World's Most Popular RPG- and to some extent the current edition - is an example of a tabletop game system built with combat at its core. While it leverages a very generic fantasy setting, one that does little to encourage exploration, a creative and ambitious referee can add what's missing. At this point there is not much novelty to reveal in the realms, and adding your own ideas seems desirable. This is precisely the way that an imaginative (and perhaps willfully independent) referee can adapt the edition to suit their needs. 

I find 4th Edition a remarkably good tabletop miniatures combat game. But that is not all that I desire from my hobby. The rest of what I crave in an RPG experience has to be supplied using my own resources and creations, if I am running a 4e game. Personally, I am not opposed to that approach, so I continue to referee my version of 4th Edition inserting various homebrew elements to deliver the game I am more content to be running. Unfortunately, 4th Edition, with or without modifications, is not an easy game to find players for. My quest continues.

So I ask myself this question, "What do you want from your game?" The question is, I believe, a pertinent one given the limits of time and money, and the host of competition for both in terms of my hobby, and because certain games inherently offer one thing over others. 

Is there a game that I can be truly satisfied with? Maybe this is not possible. I wrote recently about wanting a game where I get to "make stuff up" in terms of rulings as well as world-building.

I will close this post with a quote from the 1983 Basic Dungeon Masters Rulebook wherein Frank Mentzer writes in his Preface,  "A big part of the game is the mystery and excitement that comes from not knowing all the answers."